From the Bookshelf of Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge…

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #1)

Ransom Riggs

Discussion: 2015 Challenge Prompts

Why we're reading this: An author I never read

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2015 Challenge Prompts

Prompt 25: A book you were supposed to read in school but didn't
By Ann · 67 posts · 992 views

last updated Jan 17, 2023 03:51PM

Prompt 39: A book with magic
By Ann · 48 posts · 446 views

last updated Jan 02, 2019 05:46AM

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What Members Thought

Mar 05, 2015 Krissy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, buddy-read, pgs-300-399, cover-color-gray-silver

The ending was pretty exciting but, damn, it was a sllooooowwwww journey getting there. The first 90% of this book was pretty dull but necessary. Everybody tells me that books 2 and 3 are the tits and this one is more of an introduction. Which is why I sat through the entire thing. Otherwise I would have marked it DNF. And the kissing? Weird and awkward. If you want to get technical we are witnessing an 88 year old woman making out with a 16 year old boy. And said woman used to be the girlfriend ...more

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Mar 16, 2016 Kristin rated it really liked it

I've seen this book on many bestseller lists and featured tables at bookstores, but wasn't sure it was my type of book. After reading the Harry Potter books and others that create fantasy worlds within the real world and finding a free copy of this book, I figured it couldn't hurt to take a chance. The book opens with the narrator, Jacob, a teenager whose only friend is his slightly demented grandfather, witnessing a brutal attack on that grandfather. Grandpa tells stories, and Jacob is the only I've seen this book on many bestseller lists and featured tables at bookstores, but wasn't sure it was my type of book. After reading the Harry Potter books and others that create fantasy worlds within the real world and finding a free copy of this book, I figured it couldn't hurt to take a chance. The book opens with the narrator, Jacob, a teenager whose only friend is his slightly demented grandfather, witnessing a brutal attack on that grandfather. Grandpa tells stories, and Jacob is the only one who ever believed him, though Jacob's skepticism grows as he gets older. After the attack, Grandpa whispers a cryptic message to Jacob, one that makes little sense until Jacob is looking around Grandpa's home and finds some letters that convince him that the stories might be real after all.
By seeking out the meaning of Grandpa's message, Jacob winds up visiting the title home, where children with peculiar abilities live, a safe haven for these children who otherwise would be either shunned by society, or have their peculiar abilities exploited. Meeting everyone who lives there, including an invisible boy, a girl who would float away without her lead shoes, and Emma, who can shoot fire from her hands and immediately develops a crush on Jacob, validates the stories Grandpa told and the pictures he showed Jacob, piquing his curiosity. As he learns more and more about the children, and their caretaker, Miss Peregrine, Jacob feels at home with them, but to choose to remain with them would involve giving up all remnants of the life he's known to this point.
Riggs ties the story together with photographs, all legitimate and minimally retouched/altered, and it's these photographs that make this book more than just a simple fantasy story. It almost feels as if Riggs wrote his story after picking out the best pictures and arranging them in an order he liked. I'm a fan of odd garage sale finds, but I never thought to buy old photo albums full of people and situations that are foreign even to the original owners, but that's exactly what Riggs did. What he does with the more mudane photos is a mystery (probably throws them away), but the ones he found are definitely captivating and made me wonder what the original meaning was behind them.
Overall, I felt that the plot moved awfully slowly in the beginning, but after the climax, the book wrapped up quickly. It is evident that there is at least one sequel because the ending is left open, so of course I will have to continue on, to decide whether the story is enough to warrant multiple books or should have been one Harry Potter-length tome. However, if making it into one book would have come at the cost of removing the pictures, then multiple books were a must. ...more

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Aug 21, 2012 Lisa rated it it was amazing

AMAZING! That is the first word that came to mind as I read the book. I could have finished the book in a day or two but wanted to take my time to enjoy it. It was not scary as some people have said. Instead it is a little spooky because it makes you question the viability of stories of monsters told to scare children. Things like time travel, monsters are suddenly almost believable, and strangely backed up by the real pictures that become a part of the story. Fiction and real life wars come tog ...more

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